'Not proud as an Indian...': Amartya Sen's critique of Kashmir move
Amartya Sen found gaps in the centre's move to scrap Article 370
Nobel laureate Dr Amartya Sen on Monday fervently criticised the government's move on Kashmir, saying it not only concentrated on majority rule "as opposed to it sustaining the rights of all human beings".
"I don't think ultimately you will have any resolution in Kashmir without democracy," he told NDTV in an interview.
The 85-year-old said, "As an Indian, I am not proud of the fact that India has lost the reputation of a democratic country when India was one of the first non-Western countries to become a democratic country.
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The government's decision to move away from giving special status to Jammu and Kashmir, and to split the two states into two union territories, have received political and popular support.
Prominent opposition parties and individual leaders supported the bifurcation bill. A section of Congress leaders supported the end to the special status which will now ensure that the two states have the same status as those in the rest of the country.
In this way, Jammu and Kashmir would not have their own constitution, flag, penal code and the power to decide who purchases land in the state.
On the question of whether outsiders can buy land in Jammu and Kashmir, Dr Sen said it should have been "something for the people of the state (Jammu and Kashmir) to decide".
"This is something in which Kashmiris have a legitimate point of view because it is their land," he said.
He also criticised the government on its decision to keep the mainstream political leaders of Jammu and Kashmir under arrest.
"I don't think you will ever have fairness and justice without hearing the voices of the leaders of the people, and if you keep thousands of leaders under restraint and many of them in jail, including big leaders who have led the country and formed governments in the past ... you are stifling the channel of democracy that makes democracy a success," he said.
The government has described its decision to tighten overall security in Jammu and Kashmir in order to prevent repercussions that might cost lives.
"That's the classic colonial excuse. That's how the British ran the country for 200 years," Dr Sen said. "The last thing that I expected when we got our independence... is that we would go back to our colonial heritage of preventive detentions," he added.
